"… Maureen Alsop matches lyric grace with a violently
beautiful use of metaphor to mate the intimate with the vast." Farid
Matuk, University of Arizona Poetry Center

“Alsop creates a world reminiscent of that in Geoffrey Hill’s
Mercian Hymns, a world that seems to exist in
multiple times at once, manipulating elements of myth and mysticism,
the natural world, and modern day totems…” S. Whitney Holmes, The
Offending Adam

“Alsop’s poems are wicked, irreverent, often tender with a
sly edge; yes, sometimes they’re abundant in their play, and she goes
after this decadent language with intense vigor.” Metta Sama, Her
Circle

“There are many… that I must still return to. I find myself
unable to demand meaning from them, but rather like lovers, they give
of them selves best as reward for gentle coaxings.” Moira Richards, Women
Writers

“Alsop’s poems may be shameless in their eroticism but they
are anything but empty. These poems are filled with genuine feeling and
intelligence. She writes with an emotional tension that rarely lapses
or becomes distraught....these poems contain some of the best new
writing I have had the pleasure of reading in some time.” Michal
Rattee, FutureCycle Poetry

“By turns delicately atmospheric, by turns almost alarmed by
what they witness, these poems are united by their unflinching look at
the limen between beauty and the grotesque, at the potential of
surrender when the two become one.” Stephany Prodromides, Poetry
International

“Alsop is skilled at creating sensual imagery, often
referring to both the beauty and violence in nature, and skilled also
at sudden shifts in tone that turn poems in completely different
directions. These shape and subject shifts distinguish her work, make
her able to acknowledge what is human in the wilderness that defines
the world.” Michelle Gillett, Calyx

“Alsop’s poems are sublime; the poems morph with each line to
be an ever expanding beauty. As Kant’s sublime was, ‘to be found in a
formless object,’ the sublime is present in these poems as the images
appear, disappear, to appear again. The book is like visiting a haunted
house, the ghosts are ever present and yet delightfully elusive.”
Nicelle Davis, Pank

“[Alsop’s poems] …transform the way we perceive the ordinary
world around us through stunningly original imagery and language.”
Christina Cook, Poet’s Quarterly

“Alsop is brilliantly incantatory, each poem conveying the
sense it was transcribed while under a spell, and just as lush and
strange as you would expect. Alsop is an alchemist, possessing the
uncanny gift of rendering the concrete abstract, the opaque
transparent…Alsop has succeeded handsomely in dissolving the familiar:
those liminal borders between poem and poet, poet and narrator,
narrator and narrative, seer and seen. We are the fortunate voyeurs and
trustees of her journey.” Lissa Kiernan, Arsenic Lobster